


Valentine & Vimes: Uranium Fever

by Aleaiactaest, Slyjinks



Series: Valentine & Vimes [5]
Category: Discworld - Terry Pratchett, Fallout 4
Genre: Canon-Typical Sexism, Child Abandoment, Gen, Radiation Sickness, References to self-induced memory loss, canon-typical bigotry
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-17
Updated: 2020-10-25
Packaged: 2021-03-08 18:47:10
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 17,687
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27061417
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Aleaiactaest/pseuds/Aleaiactaest, https://archiveofourown.org/users/Slyjinks/pseuds/Slyjinks
Summary: When radium, often used in troll drugs, was extracted from pitchblende, the leftover was something that the people of the Disc called uselessium, a worthless metal that was typically discarded. Some years ago, Leonard of Quirm had studied uselessium, fascinated by some of its properties, which he thought might be useful in mining.The dwarfs knew that pitchblende and its byproducts carried with it a sort of invisible curse, one that caused a slow, wasting sickness, and they called this sickening glow that couldn’t be seen without a scintillator the Radiant Dark.Leonard had dismissed this as superstition. He still had his samples.As Leonard wasted slowly over time, Vetinari assumed it was due to age, until Commander Vimes had returned from an imaginary world with imaginary people made real, a world with a different name for uselessium, a world that better understood its dangers.How fortunate that some of these imaginary people were immune to the ravages of the Radiant Dark, and even more fortunate was that one of them, the student wizard DiMA, was now in debt to Vetinari…
Series: Valentine & Vimes [5]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1689076
Comments: 13
Kudos: 8





	1. Hooks * Making the Grade * Returning a Book

**Author's Note:**

> Parts of this fic (mostly flashbacks) overlap Nick’s engagement period and the wedding in “Welcome Home”. Most of the fic is set very shortly after the end of “You Can’t Say ‘Fuck’ In A Terry Pratchett Novel”, after DiMA has completed a complete semester at Unseen University.
> 
> This fic has a soundtrack/Youtube playlist available: [V&V: Uranium Fever](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLLEELrwJ-FypsfBd5LPH39scvX0HI8AXL).

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The story so far: Last Sektober, a magic accident threw Sam Vimes into the role of the Sole Survivor in a simulation/game running on Hex. He believed what he experienced to be real, and his realness and belief brought a measure of realness to those characters he interacted with most. In the year-plus of in-game time, believing himself to be a widow, he fell in love with Nick Valentine. When he was brought home, the game characters who had been given realness were brought with him. Eventually Sam, Nick (who had joined the Watch), and Sybil worked things out between them. In the end, the Vimes family adopted the synth duplicate of Young Sam (now renamed Shaun) and Sam Vimes took a husband in addition to his wife. Meanwhile, DiMA stuck around Unseen University to better understand the nature of this new reality, and eventually became an official student. Piper and Nat joined the Ankh-Morpork Times staff, Deacon went to work for the Golem Trust, Codsworth went to work for the Vimes family, Strong joined the Watch, Preston became a guard for the Clacks network, Old Longfellow ran off to Fourecks to run banana wine carts across their wilds, and who even knows what Hancock is up to.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter songs: [Transformer](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1VcTWIcumNs&list=PLLEELrwJ-FypsfBd5LPH39scvX0HI8AXL&index=1) by Seabound, [Vive La Difference Engine](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qfYrlGe6O44&list=PLLEELrwJ-FypsfBd5LPH39scvX0HI8AXL&index=2) by The Men That Will Not Be Blamed for Nothing, and [Stress](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0qXmxVySMzw&list=PLLEELrwJ-FypsfBd5LPH39scvX0HI8AXL&index=3) by Justice. 
> 
> **We’ve created a Discord server for chatting about Discworld, Fallout, or this fic. Feel free to join us at<https://discord.gg/6QM4Egy>**

_Hooks * Making the Grade * Returning a Book_

Vimes sputtered into his tea, “Vetinari paid for DiMA’s tuition?” The steaming hot cup was now cold in his hands.

“Yes, isn’t that lovely?” said Sybil, who’d dropped that information on him nonchalantly, as if she were merely commenting on one of her social circle making a charitable donation to the Sunshine Sanctuary.

“Why?” said Vimes, his knuckles white on the handle of the poor tea cup.

“The poor dear couldn’t afford the tuition,” said Sybil.

Vetinari did not do ‘lovely’. Vetinari had enough angles for a geometry textbook. Vimes muttered, glaring at his tea, “And why would Vetinari do that to DiMA?”

 _To get his hooks into him_ , which Vimes hadn’t wanted for DiMA.

DiMA had entirely too many interesting abilities for Vetinari to get his hooks in him.

And Vimes supposed Nick would also be upset.

“It’s a wonderful old tradition for nobles to sponsor a wizard,” said Sybil.

Vimes set his teacup down. “Why didn’t DiMA ask _me_?” What was the point of having enough titles for a platoon and money he could throw around like it was street muck if not for, well, keeping his in-laws out of Vetinari’s clutches?

“I shouldn’t think DiMA would have asked anyone,” said Sybil. “He wouldn’t know to think of it. Your friends are all still so new to our ways. Havelock must have offered.”

 _There was a race,_ thought Vimes, _and I’d already lost it before I even knew it was there._

* * *

DiMA sat in the Oblong Office, and he wrote out the decryption of a ciphered clacks message, because he had looked it hubwards and widdershins, and he couldn't figure out what was terrible about it. He was sure there was something awful about it, and he felt depressed that he couldn't figure out the angle. Nonetheless, he didn't feel particularly guilty when he was done, just stained in some indescribable way, so he forgot the entire thing once Drumknott took the transcription from him. 

So… DiMA was sitting in the Oblong Office, and he had done something, and he couldn’t remember what it was, and if he couldn't remember what it was, it must not have been horrible, if he wasn't trying to remember it as motivation to be a better person. He tensed, hoping the Patrician would dismiss him soon. 

The Patrician pulled out a piece of parchment from a file folder labelled 'DiMA' that Drumknott had and said, "Now, Mr. DiMA, we need to discuss your grades."

DiMA had taken on what amounted to a triple course load because he didn't have to pay for it, so he figured that he might as well make the Patrician pay for whatever it was that he was getting out of DiMA. That, incidentally, meant he would graduate an awful lot sooner than the average graduate student, if he kept up that pace. DiMA hoped he would figure out what he wanted before that happened. 

The Patrician was pointing to the one stain on DiMA's otherwise spotless report card, the Fail he had received for his mandatory Invisibility course. Surely, the Patrician had no actual interest in DiMA's grades, but it did provide an excuse for why DiMA had been here, did it not? 

Still pointing at the offending grade, the Patrician then asked, “How did you fail Beginner Invisibility? You were seen to turn invisible.”

Anyone could have reported back to the Patrician’s spy networks, but DiMA suspected probably one of the bledlows. Of course the Patrician would keep track of which people in his city could vanish at a whim.

DiMA replied, "Ah. That. Yes. Allow me to explain, your lordship. The final merely required that one turn invisible, which I did…" 

Which DiMA then did, his image rippling and blurring until he was gone. There was no point in trying to lie to the Patrician, DiMA felt, rather fatalistically. Telling the truth would end poorly, he was sure, but he was certain lying would go worse. Besides, lying took effort. The Patrician stalked around where DiMA had been and sniffed, "This is passable, for a novice, I suppose. Certainly not Distinction, but I could have seen Merit or Pass…"

"The issue was that the Professor could not see me, your lordship," said DiMA, letting the stealth field drop. It was taxing on his reactor. 

The Patrician arched a brow eloquently. 

"Common invisibility fields light up in octarine. It takes a very high level wizard to cast an invisibility spell that another wizard can't see from the next room over, your lordship," explained DiMA. "The Professor refused to believe I had done it."

The brow stayed arched. 

"The syllabus only said I had to be invisible. It did not actually state I had to cast a spell to do so," continued DiMA, "although that was probably implied. Coursers, a sort of advanced model synth hunter, are not real, of course," _yet_ said some distant echoing Fourth Thoughts, "but I was able to replicate the Stealth Boy expendable effect they often used. The Professor could not see the tell-tale octarine of a low-level invisibility spell because this is technology, not magic, your lordship." DiMA had his own reasons for trying to replicate the components of a Courser. 

"Ah," said the Patrician. "And this technology requires…?" 

"My internal reactor, your lordship. My brother could run it with the correct hardware modifications. Codsworth might be able to? I haven’t studied his schematics.” That would be rude; DiMA hadn’t even taken Codsworth on a date (not that he had any desire to). “Commander Vimes may have some of the one-shot expendable Stealth Boys; I was never privy to his inventory, your lordship.”

“Hmm. Drumknott, lend Mr. DiMA my copy of _Anecdotes of the Great Accountants, Vol. III_. He could be accomplishing much the same goal with a great deal less effort,” directed the Patrician. “He can put it back when he’s done as proof he’s understood what he’s read.”

“Yes sir. Will Mr. DiMA have temporary access to sir’s study for the purposes of returning this book?” inquired Drumknott.

“Absolutely not,” the Patrician said crisply. “How else will I assess his comprehension?”

“Very good, sir,” said Drumknott.

The Patrician then inquired, “Now Mr. DiMA, who are the enemies of this Professor?”

“I had not looked into that, your lordship?” DiMA replied, shifting uncomfortably.

The Patrician sighed theatrically and dropped DiMA’s ill-fitting honorific, despairing, “DiMA, DiMA, DiMA, we are going to have to work on this with you, I see...”

* * *

The Patrician was by now fairly sure that synths could not hear any better than humans. After DiMA was gone, he commented to Drumknott, “It is an odd business, him having been a fictional character, but he was written as being the sort of person who could escape from a maximum security dungeon with a confused bystander in tow.” The wizard graduate student Zinon Elias had been very chatty with one of the Patrician’s clerks about DiMA’s storyline. “He would do well to be reminded of that fact.”

* * *

DiMA first tried to simply walk into the Palace and return the book. He didn’t get particularly far before a Palace Guard told him that he wasn’t allowed to wander into restricted areas, but DiMA allowed the guard to politely show him out and then went in another entrance until he had mapped out quite how far he could get before guards started telling him that he was wandering into restricted areas. There were quite a few restricted areas, and some of them did not overlap. DiMA added them to the map he was constructing in his head, and he noted that the map did not match the blueprints on file in the library or any of the more popular tourist guides.

The Palace made his internal Geiger click far more than an old stone building ought to, and based off the tone of the clicks, DiMA had mapped where the ‘hot’ zone was, though that was a mere curiosity. He wasn’t going there.

Then he snuck in, in the middle of the night. Breaking into the Palace could be a serious offense, and DiMA didn’t think, ‘The Patrician practically dared me to break in,’ was actually a workable defense if he was caught. With the help of his stealth field, DiMA actually made it as far as the Patrician’s study, and he put the book back in the clear empty slot where it went.

Then something hooked one of DiMA’s ankles and swept him down to the floor, there was a _snikt_ , and he felt a sharp point at his throat, angled such that a thrust would go through his mouth and then clean through his head. The Patrician stood to the side of DiMA, the sword that fit into his cane in hand, dressed as he usually was, in his understated blacks. He tsked, “You are entirely too noisy, DiMA. Haven’t you ever heard of silence in libraries?” He plucked the book off the shelf, put it back in DiMA’s shaking hands, and directed, “Read it again.”

The point evidently made, the Patrician returned the sword to his cane, and DiMA ran for it. It seemed like every Palace Guard was now suddenly looking for _someone_ , and DiMA only narrowly made it out the main entrance, because the back exits were even _more_ heavily patrolled. He made it back to the High Energy Magic Building, but the terror didn’t fade until after his second class that next morning.

The night was a bad time to return the book, DiMA decided, because the Patrician was probably there at night, unless he was away on business, and the Patrician apparently had very good hearing. So on a weekend day when he didn’t have any courses, he took a stack of papers with him, and he set up to watch the Palace to try to decipher its traffic patterns. This proved to be more of a challenge than he had originally expected. Almost every decent watching perch was already occupied by a gargoyle, and most in the area were surely employed by the Patrician, the Watch, or both. Two jobs would be twice as many pigeons!

He did ask a gargoyle if he could sit next to him, which the gargoyle had been fine with, but when DiMA had asked him if he was going to tell the Watch or the Patrician, the gargoyle had said something like, “Yyyeeessss,” so DiMA had moved on. Commander Vimes already had enough trumped-up reasons to be piqued at DiMA; he didn’t want to give him more ammunition.

Most of the cafes in the area were already heavily busy, and the problem was, DiMA neither drank nor ate. For the chance to stay at a cafe for a bit so that he could watch out the window, he ended up buying a coffee and a meat pie, with the thought that he’d give it to whichever of his friends he ran into next, because students would eat cold food. They weren’t picky. 

Then he went climbing again, trying to find a spot that had not been claimed by a gargoyle. Eventually, DiMA found a particularly precarious area, perhaps a little too exciting for the average gargoyle, and there, he found someone else: Deacon. DiMA only knew of Deacon in passing, though he’d been heavily involved with that business with the Creator’s Dictionary. Besides, the sunglasses were a bit of a giveaway. Deacon commented, “Y’know, as someone who used to protect synths for a living, I have to tell you that heights are no place for you to be. Or anyone, really.”

“But you’re up here,” DiMA pointed out, very reasonably, he felt, and he sat down on the narrow archway next to Deacon. He pulled out his stack of papers. Some wizards joked about throwing papers down stairs and then assigning the highest grades to the papers that flew the farthest down the stairs. For a brief moment, he considered throwing all the papers off the archway, four stories high in the air, but he quickly decided against it.

Deacon frowned. “Look, I’m up here on serious business. So serious, it makes Sam Vimes look like a comedy show. What are you doing up here?”

DiMA considered Deacon and what little he knew of him, and he decided to tell the truth, because he didn’t think that Deacon would believe him, “I need to return a book to the Patrician.”

“Whoa, okay, you could have just said you didn’t want to tell me. My feelings won’t be hurt,” Deacon snorted. “Hey, you’re… grading papers?”

“Yes. I’m a teaching assistant for Basic Sortilege,” said DiMA. He didn’t have to grade for eighteen classes anymore, but teaching assistant positions were better than being a grader, and DiMA _liked_ teaching, so he was a teaching assistant for seven and one classes, which meant… he graded for them.

“Sortilege? Kind of like this is sort of a ledge?” Deacon said, smirking.

DiMA narrowed his optics, and he pulled out an old deck of caroc cards. He directed, “Ask me a question.”

“I’ve asked you plenty of questions! You’re the one sort of on a ledge,” said Deacon, who was also sort of on a ledge.

“Very well. What am I doing up here…” said DiMA, and he shuffled his cards, and he tried, very hard, to not think about them. It was too easy for him to track the cards and know precisely which one was where. Wizards tended to think caroc decks were somewhat beneath their dignity, but sortilege was still a major field of study. The most charitable interpretation DiMA had heard so far was that caroc decks helped to focus the mind. What came up when DiMA drew his one card was the Wizard Reversed: Manipulation, poor planning, untapped talents. He looked at that and said, “Hmm.”

“Oh, I get it! You’re practising for an extreme game of Cripple Mr. Onion!” said Deacon.

DiMA gave Deacon an opaque look and put away the deck of cards.

After a moment, Deacon asked, “So… you were from a synth colony on an island? The Railroad was going to try to send some help.”

DiMA debated about how depressing was the appropriate level of depressing with someone he had barely met, once. He concluded: not very. So rather than attempting to engage Deacon in a discussion about the fact they were both fictional characters made real, he answered politely, “Yes. I lived in a synth refuge called Acadia. We would not have turned away help, but,” he shifted uncomfortably, “mine and I were aware of the Railroad, and we were uncomfortable with how comfortable the Railroad was with wiping synths.”

“Those were voluntary! Some folks just can’t live with the terror that the Institute might get them again,” Deacon said, shrugging. “It’s easier for them to forget.”

Forgetting was easy, oh yes, indeed. Remembering was the hard part. 

“So what’s with the Metropolis look?” asked Deacon.

“Come again?” asked DiMA, perplexed.

“Look, I know you’re Nick Valentine’s brother, heh, sorry, Nick Valentine- _Vimes_ , boy, that was a trip, but what’s up with the vacuum tubes?” asked Deacon, who was nosy, wasn’t he?

“I used to have problems with my memory and needed expansion storage,” said DiMA. Then he’d realized he wasn’t actually over a hundred years old and that most of his storage space was filled with garbage data. A solid defragmentation had cleared that up. Now he was almost empty.

“Yeah… I know the feeling. I had to go get an Igor to put some of my memories in a turnip,” said Deacon.

DiMA was almost entirely sure that Deacon was lying there, but he couldn’t be completely certain. He’d met Igors.

Eventually, Deacon seemed to see whatever he was waiting for, and he climbed down, leaving DiMA up on the precarious archway. DiMA finished his grading and made the notes he’d been looking for on the traffic patterns in and out of the Palace from the hubwards side on a Saturday.

* * *

It was towards the end of the semester when he finally got the next piece of Courser-related technology on his list working. DiMA had had a good look at the inside of the Patrician’s study, even if he’d ran out in a hurry. He knew where it was in space. He’d also reread the book a few times, and he’d scrounged up a mottled dark grey and green outfit that covered most of his body. He was thankful, for once, that his optics did not glow like Nick’s. He’d spent a few days, on and off, over the last few months, watching the Palace, from several angles.

DiMA was familiar with the concept of a government watch list. He was written as having put Commander Vimes and Nick Valentine on _his_ , insofar as he was written as having sent Chase to shadow them. He was absolutely sure that, if he wasn’t already on the Patrician’s Watch List, he would have been added to it with his rather inept surveillance of the Palace. Maybe he was on that list twice now? Nick would have known how to do what DiMA had been attempting better, and his brother did visit him often, but there was really no good way to tell his brother that he was staking out the Palace to try to return a book to the Patrician. Besides, if DiMA did tell Nick that, Nick might tell his husband, and Commander Vimes would find some terrible spin on all of it that made DiMA look like a monster because…?

Finally, if DiMA told Nick, and Nick told Commander Vimes, then Commander Vimes might nose about and discover that DiMA had installed a functional set of Relay circuits into himself. He thought a moment, picturing the Patrician’s study in space, his internal coolant systems whined, and he was there. It was the hour after lunch. The lunch break was too obvious, and the Palace Guard would have been on edge. The hour after lunch, most entities were digesting their lunches. More, DiMA knew the Patrician’s coach was not at the Palace right now. Hopefully, the Patrician wasn’t home. He slipped the book back on the shelf, and he took a moment to collect himself.

His coolant system felt like it was dying, but despite that, he shut off his fans, because they _were_ too noisy. DiMA definitely didn’t have the energy for another Relay any time soon, but he thought he could pull off a brief stealth field if he really needed to. Internal temperature sensors whining at him, he crept out of the study towards a stairwell. He made it to the stairwell, which was in a restricted area, and he walked down. As DiMA reached the first floor, he noted that this particular stairwell did not go down to the dungeons and that the last step of the stairs creaked echoingly loudly, despite DiMA trying to creep as quietly as he could. Like many stairwells, it had a dark alcove just under the first flight of stairs. As he reached for the door, it started to open. DiMA took a second glance to make sure the dark alcove wasn’t full of spikes and threw himself in there.

For a moment, he considered activating his stealth field, for all that his head was hammering from near-overheating. DiMA fretted; he was in dark grey and green, and he thought he might make part of the shadow look just a bit too light. A human Palace Guard stepped into the stairwell and looked up at the stairs, squinting.

DiMA left the stealth field off. Maybe the grey was too light, but a sudden change of one part of the shadow to a darker black when DiMA no longer appeared to be there would be more attention-getting to a human than just an insufficiently dark shadow was. He waited sweltering seconds.

Internal debate about colour-matching grey proved entirely unnecessary. The guard didn’t even look at the shadows in the alcove. He said aloud, “Huh. Thought I heard something in here. Must just be the sound of one hand clapping. Happens all the time, that. Just as often as trees falling in forests with no one to hear them.”

The guard turned around on his heel and left, the door shutting behind him. When DiMA could no longer hear his footfalls, he turned his fans back on, and his coolant started to circulate again. He waited there a few minutes, until his temperature was back within proper operational range. 

DiMA hadn’t been seen to enter the Palace, and he was determined that he wouldn’t be seen leaving it, either. DiMA had looked at the Palace from multiple angles, and he knew which exit went out to the shade at this time of day, at this time of year, in an odd year. Unfortunately, that side of the Palace faced the Assassins’ Guild, where some more perceptive sorts might be watching. Even if the Patrician was extraordinary, perhaps _superordinary_ , that was still where he’d schooled.

Between the lawn and the width of Widdershins Broadway, there was no way that DiMA was going to be unseen, even if he clung to every last scrap of shadow like a limpet. DiMA, despite his penchant for bodily modification, was not a winged synth, and the roof was too far from anything to make a jump for it. So he had to go further down. Ankh-Morpork was built on Ankh-Morpork.

DiMA found a different staircase that went farther down. It was darker, and there was the sound of kittens mewing and humans screaming. Then a wet thump. He thought, somewhat petulantly to himself, that he might have been written as a murderer, as someone who would set up killswitch backdoors in vital public services such as the fog condensers, as someone who could be talked around to accepting the use of a nuclear device to eliminate a religious cult, but he’d never had anyone tortured, either in his backstory or as something he had actually done as a thinking being. DiMA had, in fact, been written to have _saved_ someone from what was effectively torture. Yet here was the Palace of the employer of the _incorruptible_ Commander Vimes, and… what? Vimes went to work every single day for a Tyrant who authorized the use of torture, who had people assassinated, who _was_ an Assassin, who spread disinformation around like poison candy, but when he’d been faced with DiMA, Vimes had found what DiMA have been written to have done in the name of trying to keep the humans on the island from slaughtering each other as completely unforgivable?

Or maybe it was just that Vimes couldn’t actually do anything about the Patrician, but he’d been in the position to do something about DiMA. Current flowed down the gate of least resistance.

What in the world did his brother see in the man? _Maybe_ , DiMA’s Second Thoughts speculated, _Maybe Vimes is just good in bed…_ His Third Thoughts pointed out that the guard down the hallway had just turned his back, and DiMA made his move.

Eventually, DiMA made it below the Palace, and he wandered off into the tunnels. There were rats. Some of them might have been the talking sort, like his brother’s partner, but if they were, they weren’t talking to DiMA. Graffiti proclaimed, “Smash pottery!” and “Eat Hot Stake”. He found the caustic remains of what were probably troll drugs on the ground. DiMA ducked into the shadows to let a group of homeless men stroll by, but they looked lost in their own little worlds. If only the smell had also been lost in their own little worlds.

Once he judged himself to be about a block away from the Palace, DiMA made his way back above ground, and he found himself in an alley. He peeked out to the main road. Now DiMA knew where he was, and from there, it was just a matter of walking back to the University. He entered via the loose bit of bricks in the wall that everyone knew about, and the Unseen University grounds was littered with fine old trees. In the shade of one of them, he changed back into his usual attire, and he made his way back to the High Energy Magic Building, where he slumped down in his little desk cubby.

The Relay equipment was right where it had been and didn’t look any worse for the wear. Chatur was in, and he hailed, “DiMA! Where’d you go?”

“I had to return a book,” DiMA said, and he let the realization that he’d done it wash over him. He’d broken into the Palace, returned the Patrician’s book, in his study, and left. He’d done it, and he couldn’t tell anyone. His giddy victory, by necessity, had to be solitary.

“Oh, Offler’s teeth, DiMA! Don’t tell me that you Relayed into the Library. You’ll get yourself killed, trying that,” said Chatur.

“No. I didn’t Relay into the Library,” DiMA agreed.

* * *

People grew older. People grew sick. People died. The Patrician knew this, always. He knew this whenever the weather changed and his leg ached. He knew this in the flicker of candlelight. Vetinari was, by some standards, an old man.

Leonard da Quirm was older than him. Vetinari cared quite deeply for the older man, one of his few genuine friends in this world, but he’d long ago made peace with the fact that he would, if all went well for Ankh-Morpork, outlive his old friend by a considerable number of years. He hadn’t expected to outlive Leonard, though, by this much of a margin.

The man’s health was failing. It had been for years, so slowly that Vetinari had barely perceived it, and yet, sometimes, he felt as if he’d blinked and missed it. Leonard had always been a peerless artist, but over time, his little sketches had lost some of their detail, and the carvings that he made were rougher. Leonard complained that the sensation in his fingertips was going out.

Leonard spent weeks on a spice diffuser, saying that his sense of smell was off.

He was weaker, his skin thinner, his eyes less keen. Lately, he’d been forgetful. Vetinari could solve most ciphers himself, but he’d always relied on Leonard to solve the ciphers that were beyond even him. Now, Leonard would make it halfway through a cipher, and his mirror-writing would trail off halfway through working it out, and when Vetinari came back, Leonard would be staring up at the high window, trying to shave eggshells down to translucency.

It had all been so subtle, so slow, as years stole away, taking with them, in dribs and drabs, pieces of what made Leonard _Leonard._

But age did that, and perhaps it had come early for Leonard.

Vetinari was acquainted with burial. He still left treats on Wuffles’s grave weekly. But he walked out to the grave with Mr. Fusspot these days. Nature abhored a vacuum. Voids in power would be filled. Leonard was too distractible, as his health failed him, for Vetinari to rely on all the time for the trickiest of ciphers… but in one of Commander Vimes’s imaginerary acquaintances, DiMA, Vetinari had found someone he could at least impose upon with regards with decryption.

Something nagged at Vetinari, though. His metaphorical terrier, Commander Vimes, had gotten a sort of illness called ‘acute radiation poisoning’ off too much exposure to a sort of energetic rocks, though Vimes had recovered. That same DiMA had been useful enough in cleaning up that underground area, and part of the cleanup had involved taking the ‘radioactive’ materials, putting them in lead boxes, and burying it all elsewhere. Lead boxes, unmarked burials at night, invisible poison… it all seemed a sort of magic, though DiMA had assured Vetinari it wasn’t.

Some rocks emitted energy that was dangerous to humans and similar lifeforms, such as dwarfs. The dwarfs knew this, actually, Vetinari learned from some reading. These same rocks were dangerous to trolls in a different way: they were the basis of most illegal troll drugs.

Leonard had been interested in those sorts of rocks, particularly the one called ‘uselessium’, though he’d had all sorts. He probably still had them in a box somewhere in his workshop, and having read what he’d read in those dwarf writings, it gave Vetinari pause. He hadn’t known. Leonard hadn’t known. But if the dwarf writings were correct, prolonged exposure to this… ‘radiant dark’, this… radioactivity, would cause a slow, subtle sickness, not so dramatic as the acute radiation poisoning that Vimes had suffered, but a sickness nonetheless.

Vetinari had to get those rocks out of Leonard’s workshop, but he couldn’t touch them himself. He didn’t know that there was any particular hurry, per se, to remove the rocks from the workshop; they’d been there years. Surely the damage was done and a month here or there could not be so large a thing. Now, Vetinari could have sent a golem, he supposed, but there was the matter of the traps leading all the way up to Leonard’s workshop, and it would take an unusually light-footed golem to navigate those. So what a happy accident it was to have a radiation-proof man in his service! ...of course, that was hardly an accident. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

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	2. Anecdotes of the Great Accountants, Vol. III * Geometry * Plumbing

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter songs: [Control](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ajj84Nyb0Bw&list=PLLEELrwJ-FypsfBd5LPH39scvX0HI8AXL&index=4) by Juno Reactor, [Power & Control](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o3Rp_0hoNTY&list=PLLEELrwJ-FypsfBd5LPH39scvX0HI8AXL&index=5) by Marina and the Diamonds 
> 
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_Anecdotes of the Great Accountants, Vol. III_ _* Geometry * Plumbing_

A few days after that, after Finals were done and grades were tallied, DiMA found himself again in the Patrician’s office. He was asked to decrypt a clacks’s flimsy cipher, which apparently read, ‘Endless Street 113, at quarter past midnight’, to which the Patrician looked to Drumknott and said, “Ah, very good. That was what we thought it said.”

DiMA had finished his finals, but it seemed the Patrician was still testing him? He gave the Patrician a bleary look.

The Patrician looked back to DiMA and said, “Explain how that cipher works.”

DiMA tried to think how to phrase the answer. He started, “Three very large positive integers _e_ , _d_ and _n_ are found such that such that with modular exponentiation for all integers _m_ (with 0 ≤ _m_ < _n_ ) _m_ to the _e_ to the _d_ is defined as equal to _m_ (mod _n_ ) -”

The Patrician sighed and shook his head. “Another time, DiMA. Can you use that same cipher to instead encrypt ‘Peach Pie Street 50, at quarter past midnight’?”

“Yes, your lordship,” said DiMA, and he did, and he conjectured that someone was going to be very surprised about what they found at Peach Pie Street 50 at quarter past midnight. He thought about going to see, himself, for a moment. But they seemed to be done here, as Drumknott dispatched the message elsewhere, and so, the moment passed, and DiMA forgot what he had done.

The Patrician pulled out a copy of DiMA’s report card, and he asked, “DiMA, would the fact that _Anecdotes of the Great Accountants, Vol. III_ is back in my study have anything to do with the fact that you failed Basic Teleportation?”

“Interesting conjecture, your lordship,” said DiMA. “I will note, however, that Professor Eroqirax, who taught Basic Teleportation, recently published a paper on teleportation that didn’t read anything like any of his previous work, and he isn’t tenured yet, which puts him under considerable pressure. Now, for my Introduction to Post-Mortem Communications class, I had to contact a shade, so I conveniently chose Avegeor, who had taught Basic Teleportation right up until his untimely death, and his shade confirmed that Eroqirax’s new paper wasn’t Eroqirax’s paper at all - it was Avegeor’s. Eroqirax thought that Avegeor wouldn’t be around to protest, but in wizarding matters, it doesn’t always matter if the victim is dead. In any case, Dr. Iqium hates Eroqirax, and Iqium is in the Brothers of the Order of Midnight, as I am,” wizarding Orders didn't matter at all, except when it did, and then it mattered very much, “and Iqium _is_ tenured, so he’s quite happy to pursue this plagiarism investigation against Eroqirax. _When_ ,” not _if_ , “the results of that investigation come out, all of Eroqirax’s work is going to be thrown into question, and my grade on Basic Teleportation will be stricken from the record. So that is not, in fact, a Fail there, your lordship.”

“Yes, I daresay that is not a Fail at all,” the Patrician agreed coolly. “So tell me about the Nontraditional Student Association.”

That was what else DiMA had been up to, aside from being the teaching assistant for Basic Sortilege and his coursework and testing out his Relay modifications and his research in the High Energy Magic Building...

> _For office hours, DiMA had been sitting with Ellsworth Manning, who was a freshman student in Basic Sortilege, and he was going over how one could usually tell a caroc deck made with wizards in mind, because the Magician was replaced by the Wizard. Magicians were, to Wizards, a lower form of life, just barely above Conjurors. They didn’t want them in their silly decks of rubbish fortune-telling cards._
> 
> _That was when a dwarf who had the look of someone who was very definitely not lost had tromped over to DiMA’s cubby. He’d demanded, “So how did you get accepted, then, if you’re not human?”_
> 
> _Which had been when the Fool had flipped out of the deck._
> 
> _DiMA had said mildly, “I am currently working with a student, but I will be able to address your concern when I am done.”_
> 
> _The dwarf had apparently not expected a mild delay and didn’t seem to know what to do with that, so he’d crossed his arms and waited until Ellsworth was done. It turned out the dwarf was Glori Orison, the eighth son of Ori Orison, and his brothers were:_
> 
>   1. _Ori Orison, named after their father, and an artificer, also like their father_
>   2. _Cori Orison, an engineer_
>   3. _Dori Orison, who was still trying to find himself_
>   4. _Lori Orison, who worked on the trains_
>   5. _Stori Orison, who did printing press maintenance_
>   6. _Tori Orison, who was studying to become a grag and had political aspirations_
>   7. _Gori Orison, who had died in a mining disaster_
> 

> 
> _Then the dwarf had said, hesitantly, “I’m still an eighth son, even if one of my brothers died, right?”_
> 
> _DiMA wasn’t really sure, so he’d called over Xian, who’d said, “As long as he was still alive when you were born, is the rule.”_
> 
> _“Oh yes, Gori was alive when I was born. He didn’t blow himself up until I was well past my fourties,” said Glori, who wasn’t just the eighth son of an eighth son. He also had a magic staff. His father and his elder brother were magic artificers, the sort who supplied items such as flying broomsticks and crystal balls and infinity fountains. His father wanted a wizard in the family as a sort of market research for his business, and Unseen University now clearly had a nonhuman student. Glori, a dutiful dwarfen son, had applied and was rather vexed by his rejection on species grounds._
> 
> _DiMA hadn’t really given much thought to the fact that almost all of the Wizards he’d seen were human. There was the Librarian, who was an orangutan. Professor Of The Leaf The Storm, a goblin, was the Emeritus Professor of Goblin Studies at Unseen University, but that was just a courtesy title; he wasn’t an actual Faculty member. DiMA had inquired of Xian, because he was there, albeit preoccupied with his Slood Dynamics homework, “So why wouldn’t the university accept nonhuman students?”_
> 
> _“It’s tradition. Wizards have always been only humans. Dwarfs just make magic items,” Xian had said._
> 
> _“That’s a sapient pearwood staff you have there, associated with air, so I’d say you’re probably a meteormancer or some other sort of weather wizard, but given that you went with pearwood, which is associated with the goddesses Astoria and Petulia, I’m guessing that you also read romance novels when you think people aren’t looking,” Glori had speculated._
> 
> _“Hah, you’re wrong! I read romance novels where everyone can see. The Agatean Empire invented the romance novel, you know,” Xian had corrected, smugly._
> 
> _Which had prompted Zinon to argue, “Hariton of Ephebe wrote _Winecup_ in the first century UC.”_
> 
> _DiMA had suggested to Glori, “Walk with me,” and had left Xian and Zinon arguing about whose people had first put torrid pen to willing paper. He’d found Ponder and politely asked why Unseen University wasn’t accepting a dwarf student, to which Ponder didn’t have much more to say than tradition._
> 
> _Then DiMA had found Alf, explained the situation to him, and brought Alf back to Ponder, and Alf had whispered in Ponder’s ear, and Ponder had said, “Er, that is… a point, Alf.”_
> 
> _Alf was from Ankh-Morpork, and DiMA **knew** what Alf would have said to Ponder, roughly: did they want Ori Orison to raise all the prices at his store because he was hacked off that his son wasn’t accepted? Because if he raised his prices, then other dwarfs would also raise their prices, because they’d be able to get away with it, and they’d also claim solidarity in their hacked off-ness…_
> 
> _There was the stick, and DiMA added a carrot, “Sir, you could tell the Archchancellor that we’d be doing it before Brazeneck and really ‘sticking it to them’.”_
> 
> _The Archchancellor loved sticking it to Brazeneck._
> 
> _“Uhm,” said Ponder, looking at Alf, DiMA, and Glori warily._
> 
> _As it turned out, Ori Orison was well-able to pay for his son’s tuition, and after that minor kerfuffle, Glori Orison was accepted as freshman wizard and placed in the order of the Venerable Council of Seers, who were very excited to see how he’d do at contact sports._
> 
> _Then a young Igor had shown up, and he’d made the point that he could see octarine very well because he had a wizard’s eyes… the wizard hadn’t been using them at the time, what with being dead and all, and it had been such a shame to let them go to waste. That wizard also had possessed a surprisingly good liver, which had gone to Igor’s cousin, Igorina. Long ago, an Igor had patched up that wizard, when he’d nearly blown himself up as a youth, and what went around, came around. Anyway, Igor didn’t want to serve a master in experiments that mocked the laws of reality. He wanted to mock the laws of reality himself. Igor was quietly shoved into the Sages of Unknown Shadow._
> 
> _Then there was a goblin, The Nothing The Spaces Between, who was being forcibly pushed by the League of Goblin Friends, but he decided to stay, anyway, when he realized that he qualified for a scholarship. Besides, goblin pots were a bit of magic, weren’t they? He ended up in the Venerable Council of Seers, with Glori Orison, and jokes were made that it was the Council of Seers, not Smellers…_
> 
> _Eleven year old Rosanna Fitget, though, was apparently more of a problem than Glori Orison, Igor (who was technically human, anyway), and The Nothing The Spaces Between all combined. Rosanna Fitget was a human girl, very much a girl, and she hadn’t put in any effort at all to, say, disguise herself as a boy. She didn’t swagger. There were no socks involved. She wasn’t randomly swearing at linguistically improbable times. She was just in the High Energy Magic Building, poking at DiMA’s relay equipment, and he wondered why, precisely, she was his fault; the Faculty was certainly blaming him for her being there. DiMA liked to think he would remember if he’d been involved in the creation of a girl..._
> 
> _In any case, when Rosanna Fitget had wandered in, the Chair of Indefinite Studies had dumped her on DiMA, scolding that DiMA was going to have to deal with the consequences of his ‘modern ideas’ coming to haunt him while the Faculty tried to figure out where Rosanna’s parents were so she could be returned to them._
> 
> _Chatur had shied away, warning, “If a girl touches your staff, it won’t work anymore!”_
> 
> _Alf had admitted, looking rather embarrassed, “Uhm, actually, that’s not true; my mum gave mine a washing. I’d gotten quite a bit of pizza cheese on mine, you see, and I couldn’t stop her.”_
> 
> _Chatur had looked horrified by that revelation of Alf’s._
> 
> _DiMA didn’t really understand the problem, and he wouldn’t have. He didn’t have the social context. In the Commonwealth, he didn’t think about wizards at all, but if he had, he would have thought of them as fantasy stories. Confronted with the reality of the Discworld, staying at the Unseen University gave him access to one of the very few mainframes on the Disc and also let him study philosophy, explore the laws of reality, and avoid a real job._
> 
> _And DiMA liked teaching._
> 
> _“I was told that there’d be geometry,” said Rosanna Fitget. “I like geometry.”_
> 
> _Chatur grabbed one of his books and hid behind Hex’s beehive, as if afraid that an eleven year old girl was going to come for him and steal his geometry. Zinon had said, matter of fact, “Women can’t be wizards. Everyone knows their brains would overheat.”_
> 
> _“I’m always cold, actually,” said Rosanna, sniffling a bit._
> 
> _DiMA was no great judge of human children, but he thought that she looked rather sickly-thin, and her clothing was stained and tattered. He scavenged around the laboratory and found some week old pizza that had not yet developed sapience, and he offered it to the girl, because, apparently, he was somehow qualified as a babysitter._
> 
> _Some of the students in Basic Sortilege were younger than Rosanna, though. It all depended on when a boy started to show the really worrying sorts of magic talents, like turning his brothers into pigs…_
> 
> _She snatched up the box of pizza warily and started to gobble it down, and DiMA asked, “Why do you want to be a wizard?” Maybe she’d give him some ideas. “Aside from geometry.”_
> 
> _“There’s books. I like books,” Rosanna said, between mouthfuls of pizza. “And stars? Stars are pretty.”_
> 
> _“I like the stars,” DiMA admitted. He’d lived in an old observatory. Acadia. It had never been real, but it was such a lovely fantasy._
> 
> _“And I can do magic,” the girl said in a conspiratorial tone._
> 
> _“So go be a witch! That’s what women’s magic is for. It’s… the hubward side of a hill, the rimward bank of a river,” said Xian._
> 
> _“I used magic to talk to my granny,” she said shyly, searching DiMA’s face anxiously. She seemed to be expecting a bad reaction._
> 
> _“Howso?” DiMA asked. There were so many different sorts of communications magic out there._
> 
> _“I called up her shade. Granny’s been dead since before I was born,” Rosanna concluded, “and that’s why mum and da kicked me out.”_
> 
> _Oh. Post-Mortem Communications was always the major students picked if they wanted to impress the girls. Perhaps there was a girl here who would actually be impressed by it. That was when DiMA had gone to Hex and asked Hex to place a clacks message to the Watch._
> 
> _Nick and Artificial Flavours showed up, and Nick had grimaced and explained, “Ah. I finally put a face to the name. Rosanna’s had a card on the board at the Lost Boy’s Tavern for weeks now. It’s a place where abandoned children can, for a modest sum, put up a card describing their parents. I… sometimes try to match them back up, in my off time, but,” Nick rubbed the back of his head, “the parents can get violent sometimes if they don’t want to be reunited.”_
> 
> _Nick and Flavors had taken a complete story from Rosanna from the time her parents had abandoned her - in a crowded market square, as it sometimes went - to how they had been moved out of the little apartment by the time she found her way back to it, with no notice of where they’d gone, and how’d she’d lived on the streets since then, until it had occurred to her that there was a whole big university for people who did magical things. Nick had already sent off his own clacks message back to the Watch via Hex by the time that the Chair of Indefinite Studies had shown back up to admit that the Faculty actually had no idea who Rosanna’s parents were or where to find them. Rosanna was playing with Flavors and telling him that he was a very gallant and dashing rat._
> 
> _DiMA suggested, “If I could have a word with Dr. Hix?”_
> 
> _And so DiMA had taken Rosanna to the Department of Post-Mortem Communications, and Rosanna had scribed out a very neat ritual circle on the floor of Hix’s office with the remainder of the pizza grease, and the shade of her old granny had appeared, and Rosanna had said happily, “Granny!” and she had recounted how she’d met an odd man with a crown of glass embedded in his head who had given her pizza, so things were looking up._
> 
> _DiMA felt a rather deep and abiding sense of pity for a girl who was excited by week old pizza forgotten by graduate students._
> 
> _After the shade vanished, Dr. Hix commented, “I can break the rules for a certain value of breaking the rules, within the rules, but girls aren’t actually against the rules. Cutangle changed the lore, back in the day. We even had a female wizard for a while, one Eskarina Smith. Everyone says she died when the Sourceror attacked, but if she’s dead, she’s not answering calls.”_
> 
> _So that was that. It wasn’t actually against the lore. There was just an issue of plumbing, which it apparently fell on DiMA to sort out because, somehow, all of these nontraditional students - Glori objected to that description, he was _very_ traditional, he said - were DiMA’s fault. They didn’t have any girls’ student washrooms, and they weren’t going to have a wizard use the girls’ washrooms that the housekeeping used._
> 
> _The housekeeping would object. Wizards were, apparently, too messy to be trusted._
> 
> _DiMA wondered what Eskarina Smith had used when she’d been at the University._
> 
> _In any case, that was why the Nontraditional Students’ Association had formed, and DiMA was the Chair of the association by dint of the fact that he was the one who got blamed for everything. But then, DiMA had been born guilty, in a fashion._

DiMA didn’t tell the Patrician all that. He probably already knew most of the pertinent details. The Patrician always did. The _Times_ had covered a little of it. Piper’s story about DiMA and Rosanna had ended up on the third page, and sales of ‘Klatchian Hots’ pizza had briskly increased.

The Patrician had suggested, “Once you sort that plumbing issue, you might go to Krull as an exchange student. I’ve a package I’d like to have delivered there, anyway.”

* * *

DiMA didn’t know anything about plumbing, at least not to start, and the more he studied the plumbing of the Unseen University, the less he knew. There was just the one time he’d actually needed to use a washroom himself, and that had been unwillingly, with Nick and Zinon dragging him. DiMA wondered, how had he escaped the Institute with Nick? Had he gone through the teleporter, or had he gone out through the sewers? It hadn’t actually happened, either way, because he hadn’t been real then, and he doubted any of the wizards who had worked on the game had thought it through in that level of detail. That was why his mind was almost empty, albeit filling up at a slow clip with concepts such as hydraulic head and water hammer.

So far, he knew:

  * The University moved its components around on a regular basis (obvious to practically anyone).
  * The University was alive (less obvious).
  * The plumbing system was infested with fire-breathing plants, walking bombs, and evil turtles, which were mostly the leftover thesis project of the wizard Shigeru Miyamoto, who was now centuries dead and who, when summoned as a shade, was much more interested in talking about games than he was in providing helpful input with regards to sorting the plumbing situation.1



After another soggy slog through materials he didn’t want to identify and more unfruitful mapping of the Unseen University sewers - there had to be something to transposing the plumbing connections onto a tesseract and then inverting it through seven string space - DiMA availed himself of the industrial cleaning equipment in one of the laboratories because he was, ultimately, heavy machinery. He did not use the dorm showers. He still hadn’t actually figured out where his dorm bed was, although he’d met one of his assigned dorm-mates, an excitable young student wizard of about sixteen who had dragged DiMA off to see the statue of Lumuel Panter and then made DiMA watch a boat race where teams of students wizards had run, while carrying a boat, across the Ankh.

DiMA made his way back to the laboratory in the High Energy Magic Building where he had his cubby, because his office hours were going to start soon, and someone always showed up. His office hours were oddly popular, possibly because he was always there at the time period he said he would be and because he’d stay late if someone needed extra time and because he actually answered questions, even if he did force the students to think through the material themselves, which most of the students held to be cruel and unusual on his part.

Rosanna, in her shiny black robe spangled with silver stars and matching hat, looking much less waifish than she’d started after some quality time at the Unseen University buffet, ran into the laboratory, clutching one of her geometry books, and she hid behind DiMA and whispered, “A witch is going to come steal my geometry.”

Following at an unhurried rate behind Rosanna was a young woman of perhaps sixteen or seventeen, with a pointy hat, in a blue dress. Something about her poise and bearing put DiMA in the mind of a queen, although he’d never met one. He said lowly to Rosanna, “You know, you’re Dr. Hix’s apprentice.”

Rosanna whispered, “Dr. Hix is Faculty. He doesn’t have to be useful to anyone.”

That was absolutely true. DiMA was in one of Dr. Hix’s courses this semester, and he’d had his essays all pre-written, and in the second week of the course, Dr. Hix had decided that, instead of the essays on the syllabus, he was just going to have everyone help with one of his community theatre projects. DiMA was going to be a stagehand, and he was very annoyed, because those essays he’d pre-written were _good_.

DiMA stood and looked to the witch and greeted, “Hello, madam. This is the High Energy Magic Building, and I am DiMA. How may I be of assistance?”

The witch gave DiMA a deeply skeptical look, and she said simply, “I am Miss Aching, and Mrs. Happenstance said there was a girl with some magical talents here. I was hoping to have a talk with Rosanna Fitget, there.” She paused a moment, and she seemed to be thinking. “What are you, anyway?”

DiMA had been written to be happy to explain what he was, but as time wore on and reality set in, the explaining had lost some of its lustre. Nonetheless, he said, “I am a synthetic man, capable of independent thinking and judgment, madam. Now Rosanna, do you _want_ to talk to Miss Aching?” He looked over to the girl hiding behind his chair.

“No, I don’t want her to take my geometry,” said Rosanna, sulking.

DiMA said, “It would appear she doesn’t want to talk to you. Are you going to take her geometry, madam?”

Miss Aching sighed. “No, I’m not here to take her geometry. It’s just that girls with magical talents need to train as witches, or they’ll become witches, anyway, and the untrained ones are more likely to go… cackling.”

“Explain cackling?” DiMA had two chairs, one for him, and one for a student to sit in during office hours. He gestured to the two chairs, and he sat down on the edge of his desk. Rosanna scooted out from behind DiMA’s chair and into it, hugging her book. 

Miss Aching took the other chair as if it were a throne, and she said, “Cackling. Everyone knows about bad witches, don’t they? The ones who hole up in the woods and make gingerbread houses and bake children in their ovens.”

DiMA was sure that Miss Aching would be amazed about the things he didn’t know. He didn’t bring it up. 

“I don’t cackle. I chuckle. It’s much more affably sinister,” Rosanna said primly. “Anyway, I’m not a witch.”

“I think I can see what Mrs. Happenstance was concerned about,” Miss Aching observed carefully. “You see, the company of men might not be the most suitable environment for an impressionable young witch.”

Why did people assume that DiMA, one, knew anything about what was an appropriate environment for a child of any gender and, two, that he cared? He pointed out neutrally, “She did say she’s not a witch, madam.”

Miss Aching looked tired. “I’m afraid she doesn’t really have any say in that. It’s what she is. Some girls don’t have a talent for magic, but they can learn it if they work at it, if they make it work for them, but the girls who do have a talent for magic, it’s going to come out no matter what they do.”

“We have a lead and rowan-lined gym, where neophytes can work out at High Magic without seriously unbalancing the universe, madam,” said DiMA, and he didn’t say that sometimes the neophytes seriously unbalanced themselves. Some of them left the gym as little piles of ash in bottles.

“But that’s wizard magic,” said Miss Aching.

“And that’s what I do!” said Rosanna. “I talk to dead people -”

“Witches… work with dead people,” said Miss Aching, who was looking like she didn’t want DiMA in the room, as if there was something she wanted to discuss more privately with Rosanna.

“Yes, yes, they tell me so. You put them to rest. _I wake them back up_ ,” said Rosanna.

People kept telling DiMA that Rosanna Fitget was a creepy little girl. He had no idea what they meant. Nick had found out that Rosanna’s parents were butchers, that they had left by the Traitors’ Gate with Rosanna’s older brother and sister, and that no one had any idea where they were now. Nick still checked in on her, now and then. DiMA’s brother had a soft spot for wayward children.

“That’s not very sensible of you,” said Miss Aching.

DiMA tapped the placard on his little cubby desk that said ‘DiMA - Department of Inadvisably Applied Magic’. He said mildly, “I think that Rosanna Fitget is in precisely the correct place for her inclinations, madam. More importantly, so does she.”

Rosanna beamed up at DiMA. A lost girl who wanted to explore what she was, a stranger who had come looking for her… DiMA had seen the shape of this shadow on the wall.

DiMA was relatively certain that Miss Aching could have talked him around, if she’d really wanted to. There was a certain flint sharpness about her. The sense he had, though, was that what Miss Aching really wanted was to be sure that Rosanna Fitget was not in the wrong place. 

Miss Aching admitted, “You know, we usually have to talk girls out of wanting to be witches. It’s hard work. Only about one in three stays on. Enjoy your geometry and your Post-Mortem Communications, Miss Fitget. I will let Mrs. Happenstance know that, for the time being, at least, you are not misplaced.”

1 DiMA had really dodged a bullet there; if Miyamoto had heard DiMA was a fictional game character given life, he was sure the discussion would have been even less useful.

* * *

DiMA only saw Drumknott when he looked into the Oblong Office, which meant it was time to look again and _ah_ , there was the Patrician, behind him, with a crossbow to DiMA’s head. The Patrician tsked, “You’re too slow, DiMA. We simply must work on that. I know the Archchancellor is very fond of crossbows, and he exercises considerably less trigger discipline than I do.”

“I’m aware, your lordship,” DiMA managed, a little shaken. The Patrician was just a human… theoretically… not magic at all, but he was still even more terrifying than the Archchancellor.

“Now Drumknott, how sadistic am I feeling today?” called the Patrician, who herded DiMA into the office at crossbow-point and closed the door behind him.

Drumknott said circumspectly, “There were three more of those ciphers that you weren’t able to break today, your lordship.”

“ _Very_ , then. Thank you, Drumknott. So DiMA,” said the Patrician, handing DiMA the crossbow, “you’re going to go get sights on your brother-in-law.”

DiMA held the crossbow awkwardly. He knew his way about a plasma pistol, but his brother-in-law had taken that away and Captain Carrot had broken it. Crossbows had so many more variables, such as the wind speed, the humidity in the air, the altitude… In any case, with regards to getting sights on Commander Vimes, clearly the Patrician was asking DiMA to go commit Suicide.

“I can’t help but notice you haven’t taken any courses on offensive spells,” continued the Patrician. “Philosophy, mathematics, enchantments, metaphysics, illusions, advanced simulation modelling…”

DiMA shrugged, and he put the crossbow away in his inventory. People thought he was very good at prestidigitation and got extremely excited, and DiMA didn’t tell them otherwise. He carried a schoolboy satchel just to throw people off track. “I can usually talk people down, your lordship, and if I can’t, running is always an excellent option.”

"Witches don't have a leader, but if they did, she would be Miss Aching. I heard you talked to her," said the Patrician. 

So that was why Miss Aching had seemed like a queen… "She just wanted to make certain Rosanna Fitget was not misplaced, your lordship."

Rosanna Fitget seemed to be exactly where she ought to be. She was the daughter of butchers, and the Department of Post-Mortem Communications offered a generous scholarship package to students who already knew their way around a cleaver. 

"Besides, there was a female wizard years ago, one Eskarina Smith, and what you say about Krull may be true, your lordship," said DiMA. He wasn't exactly looking forward to his trip there, to a strange little island on the edge of the map. Given his karma, he would probably find it to be a three-way religio-political morass. 

"Now, about those three ciphers…" started the Patrician, the small talk of plausible deniability over. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> S: Oddly enough, this is actually Rosanna Fitget’s third appearance, although we’re only now getting around to explaining her. She was mentioned by name as a footnote in “You Can’t Say ‘Fuck’ in a Terry Pratchett Novel”, and mentioned without a name during Vimes’s and Valentine’s wedding, just before Sam got kidnapped, as the ”young girl in a black star-spangled robe”.
> 
> A: Equal Rites goes to great extents to establish Esk as a female wizard, and then the rest of the series does nothing with it. The excuse is made of plumbing - that Unseen University doesn't have enough women's bathrooms. [(Actually, a problem in real life, too.)](https://apnews.com/article/8a06133377834c45bb8837b6638431da) Unseen Academicals has Dr. Hix attempt to recruit Glenda Sugarbean as a female wizard because he thinks she'd be a cool necromancer. This also goes nowhere. Both of these areas seemed ripe for fanfic exploration. So, as they say, it's free real estate. 
> 
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	3. Line of Sight; Eye to Eye * Sober Companion * Black Coffee

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter songs: [Amnesia](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JrPIwm1V4qc&list=PLLEELrwJ-FypsfBd5LPH39scvX0HI8AXL&index=6) by Miracle Of Sound, [Regret](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2tpkkS612uM&list=PLLEELrwJ-FypsfBd5LPH39scvX0HI8AXL&index=7) by Assemblage 23
> 
> **We’ve created a Discord server for chatting about Discworld, Fallout, or this fic. Feel free to join us at<https://discord.gg/6QM4Egy>**

_Line of Sight; Eye to Eye * Sober Companion * Black Coffee_

DiMA decided to give himself a solid week of stalking Commander Vimes from afar before he would even bother bringing the crossbow along with him. He felt faintly ridiculous, playing Courser with his joints that, if they weren’t actually old, certainly felt that way. How did Nick handle stakeouts? Chase had been able to follow Vimes without being seen, but she was scripted to be able to do so. She wasn’t real. It took DiMA less than a day to realize that Vimes didn’t actually walk into the open often, and when he was indoors, he avoided windows. He also figured out that the Watch House was trapped on the first day and ended up needing to Relay out to free himself.

Vimes’s actual house was also trapped, and DiMA wasn’t able to Relay out of the spike pit into which he’d fallen. The stellar geometry was unfavourable, and if he tried, his calculations suggested he would end up with a spike clipping through his head. In real life, clipping errors could be fatal. He’d managed to fling out his arms and legs and brace himself before he fell all the way, but the spikes were less than an inch below him, and he didn’t have the purchase to actually push himself out. He was stuck. 

“Well, I don’t think it’s a mole rat,” speculated the voice of DiMA’s brother, summoned by the noise of someone walking on the roof and then precipitously falling off when one of the tiles slid. Nick ambled over to the spike pit and peered down at DiMA. "Huh. Not who I was expecting. You can drop down, DiMA. The spikes are rubber." 

DiMA felt incredulous, but he trusted his brother, and he dropped down and fell on a pile of rubber spikes. Then he stood up, and Nick grabbed him by the hands and hauled him out of the pit. Nick commented, "I installed that one myself. Sam's better at traps than I am, but I have more free time than he does. So what the hell were you doing on the roof?" 

DiMA said primly, "Observing the nocturnal habits of swamp dragons from afar," and he pulled out a copy of _Diseases of the Dragon_ from his satchel. 

"Uh huh," said Nick, clearly not buying it. He looked over DiMA's dark grey and green outfit and commented, "Nice urban camouflage."

"I didn't want them to see me. You know, they seem to think I'm edible," said DiMA. 

"To swamp dragons, we _are_ edible," said Nick. 

They both fell silent and stood a while in the dark next to the pit trap. DiMA wished he could say something, but, 'The Tyrant wishes me to obtain a crossbow line of sight on your husband, accounting for wind resistance, humidity, and altitude,' sounded frankly asinine in his head. Eventually, Nick said, "You're clearly going through some stuff right now, and I get that you don't want to talk about it, but if you want to go and catch a show or -" 

"I'm a stagehand in one of Dr. Hix's community theater projects. I actually meant to mention that to you," DiMA admitted. "I'll get you a ticket?" 

"Yeah? Is it suitable for kids?" Nick asked, looking genuinely interested. 

DiMA gave Nick an opaque look that said, _I don't know, and you well know that I don't know what is and is not suitable for children. I let children throw fireballs around and then grade them on it._ This semester, he was the teaching assistant for Beginner Offensive Evocation, a class he had not taken, not even audited. 

Nick clarified, "Sex? Violence? Mimes?" 

"No, yes, no. There is an on-stage murder," said DiMA. 

"Which, oddly enough, means it's fine for the boys," said Nick. 

"I'll get you three tickets, then?" said DiMA. 

"Sure. Let me know what I owe you. And stay out of the traps," said Nick.

DiMA did not stay out of the traps, but it was Vimes himself who found DiMA stuck under a box that had fallen out of the ceiling in Lady Sybil’s wine cellar, which was mostly sherry. Vimes commented absently, "You're lucky Wilikins didn't find you." 

"I brought a copy of _Woddeley's Occult Primer_ for young Sam?" DiMA said, pulling the book out of his satchel. 

"In the wine cellar," Vimes said flatly. 

DiMA was written as someone who could talk down a Courser sent to reclaim an escaped synth. Vimes was considerably more formidable than a Courser. DiMA considered a moment, and then he reached into the satchel, pulled out the crossbow, and gingerly set it aside. "The Patrician sent me to get a crossbow sights on you, Commander Vimes." 

Vimes looked amused, an unpleasant grin spreading across his face. He picked up the unloaded crossbow and examined it idly. "That's what the Assassins' Guild does to trainees that get too big for their britches. So tell me, DiMA, what did you do to offend the Patrician? He's been in an awful mood lately." 

"I don't think I did anything," said DiMA, who could not be sure. He generally didn't remember the odd jobs he did for the Patrician. 

"Well, it's not me, Moist didn't do it for once, that new tax clerk didn't do it," Vimes looked at DiMA flatly, "and even I can't find fault with de Worde's coverage of the conflict in the Hublands… maybe one of the Guild Leaders, I think I heard about some trouble with the Alchemists' Guild from Cheery," Vimes mused. He turned the crossbow over in his hands, examining it. "'Viper' Mk 4, walnut stock, painted over matte charcoal grey. Expensive. Goes with your outfit."

DiMA inquired hesitantly, "I don't suppose you might allow me to get a sights on you with the understanding that I would never be able to manage it on my own and also that it would annoy the Patrician." It was well known that Vimes did not always get along with his employer and had arrested him twice in the past. 

Vimes's face went hard like stone, and he said very softly, "You are asking me if I will allow you to get a sights on me." 

The unloaded crossbow was still in Vimes’s hands, and DiMA was uncomfortably aware of the fact that Vimes could probably stove DiMA's head in by using it as a bludgeon, although DiMA reminded himself that Vimes wouldn't. DiMA said calmly, in a reasonable tone of voice, "Yes. I am."

"That's a new one on me. Don't think I've ever been asked that before." Vimes barked out a laugh. "You know, I really, truly didn't want Vetinari to get his hooks into you. That just seemed like a terrible idea all around. That's part of why I let you stay at the University instead of arresting you." 

"I haven't actually done anything wrong," DiMA said mildly. _Aside from that business with what was once Tektus's body, what I did to Cai Wathen, and maybe all those things I can't remember, all those odd jobs for the Patrician…_

Vimes was stony again. "Everyone's done something wrong. But realizing that you hadn't actually done certain things was also a part of why I left you there at the University. Come with me." 

They went back upstairs, and Vimes went around where young Sam and Shaun were playing, and young Sam had gotten Shaun in a headlock and proclaimed, "I win! Now you're arrested. You're gonna go cool off in a cell and drink moderately priced wine."

"Ugh, I get to be the Watchman this time," sulked Shaun. 

Vimes had a bit of a funny expression on his face, like he didn't quite approve of what his sons were doing but didn't know how to stop them. He settled on muttering, "Couldn't they play something else, like postal carrier or railroad engineer?" 

Young Sam looked over to the doorway, sighted his father and his…. uncle, and he lit up, "Oh hi, Father! Hi, Uncle DiMA!" and Shaun also greeted them both. 

Shaun was fascinating to DiMA, because he was growing. Synths were not able change weight, and yet, Shaun was. 

DiMA started to say that he had a book for young Sam, but Vimes elbowed DiMA and hissed, "Maybe when he's older." Then he asked normally, "Shaun, could you get your iconograph? I'm helping DiMA with a school project of his." 

Shaun went over to his shelves to find his iconograph, and young Sam asked, "What class?" 

"Streetfighting Mathematics," Vimes lied. 

Young Sam looked entirely enchanted by the concept and declared, "I want to take that class." 

"So let's just go down this hallway here. Shaun, bring the iconograph," Vimes directed, "DiMA, you stand almost up against this wall here." He handed the crossbow back to DiMA and asked, "Do you have a bolt for it?" 

DiMA reluctantly reached behind his back, pulled the bolt out of his inventory, and held it out to Vimes. Vimes examined it and commented, "Nasty one. These will punch through a breastplate from ten feet away. Now, you stand here, like this."

Vimes positioned DiMA, put the crossbow in his hands, and adjusted DiMA's grip, commenting, "Not bad, Detritus might even let it slide at the Lemonade Factory, but you'll get more control this way." He left DiMA standing there and went over to Shaun and had the boy set up his iconography. Then Vimes went to the staircase and said aloud, "Okay, so DiMA's hiding in that shadow there, he's not moving, and as I come down these stairs, I make a mistake - don't make this mistake, boys - I don't look at the shadow. I look over at the window, and - take the iconograph, Shaun."

They were all still for a moment after the flash went off, to give the imp time to draw. Then Vimes went over and looked at the still-drying iconograph critically. He suggested, "DiMA, you take a step back, deeper into the shadow." 

He was already almost on the wall, but he tried, and the wall hinged open, and DiMA fell out of the house. 

Vimes came and got DiMA out of the net into which he'd fell, and he said cheekily, "Actually, this iconograph came out great! Bring it back when Vetinari's done fuming over it. Sybil’s going to think it's hilarious." 

DiMA stood woozily with Vimes's help, and he managed, "I sincerely appreciate your assistance, Commander Vimes, and my congratulations on your ingenuity in putting a trap in that shadowy alcove, precisely where any would-be ne'er-do-well should like to stand." He put the iconograph in his satchel. 

"That one's pretty good," Vimes agreed. "Besides, we're family now."

DiMA paused. That was an odd thing for Vimes to admit. He questioned faintly, "And family is important?" Important enough to allow a ridiculous request and to demonstrate the proper grip on a crossbow and how to sight it and to teach the important lesson to look in the shadows both for lurkers and traps.

Vimes snorted, "Well… family can be overrated. Most of what was left of mine cut ties when I fell into the gutter, and I wasn’t interested in taking them back once they changed their minds because I happened to marry a rich Lady." 

DiMA stretched and tried to pop his knee back into alignment. "You seem to be undermining your point." 

Vimes said, “No I’m not. Because that’s blood family. The family we choose, the family we make, whether it’s blood or otherwise, that really is important. For whatever reason, Nick’s chosen both of us, and I may question his judgement from time to time,” and Vimes seemed to be implying that he thought Nick deserved both a better husband than Vimes and also a better brother than DiMA, “but in the end, I have to respect it. We’re chosen family, and that _is_ important."

DiMA was aware that Nick deserved a better brother, and he was trying, he really was. With regards to Vimes, the man had broken his brother's synthetic heart and gotten him shot, but… that was in the past, and Nick seemed quite content with the resolution now. DiMA would, as Vimes said, have to respect Nick's judgment. 

Vimes shook himself a bit. "Anyway, if, _if_ young Sam does go to Unseen University, could you do me a favour and make sure that Streetfighting Mathematics is available as a course?" 

* * *

The old street veterans of the Watch said they used to have to make plenty of calls to the Mended Drum, only it wasn’t the Menden Drum then, but the Broken Drum. Some of those calls were even drunken and disorderly calls and not merely to have a pint. These days, the Mended Drum had sold out, and the Watch rarely had drunken and disorderly calls from there and wouldn’t be caught drinking there. That was the way to look like a _tourist_ , and tourist was just another word for victim.

But even if most of their D&Ds were from other locales, every now and then, they’d still get called out to the Drum.

Valentine and Flavours left Fred Colon behind at the night desk, sitting in a cloud of nostalgia.

“He’s gonna still be reminiscing when we get back,” said Flavours.

“Yeah, but he’ll have refilled his mug of cocoa,” said Valentine, stepping out into the night.

The particular D&D they were picking up had already been laid out on the floor by the time they got there, which was unsurprising to both synth and rat. After all, aside from the bouncers and the clientele, plenty of barbarian entertainers were found at the Mended Drum.

But Valentine wasn’t expecting DiMA to be watching over the downed man like a sentry. DiMA rubbed his wrists and looked over at a laughing group of his classmates, explaining, “Hello, brother. He,” DiMA nudged the man on the floor with a foot, “tried to put something in Gregory’s drink.”

Valentine recognized some of DiMA’s classmates, sitting at the bar and slapping each other around the shoulders, but not all of them. They liked dragging DiMA along as a sober companion. Flavours looked over at the bartender and asked, “That story scan?”

“Something in your drink is extra,” grunted the barkeep. “But sure. Take ‘im away, officers. I already got his purse, so he won’t be too heavy for you.” The barkeep grinned with all the teeth he had left.

“Gregory?” Valentine inquired, looking at the gaggle of spotty-faced and brightly-robed student wizards. “That man try to put something in your drink?”

“Prolly,” giggled a youth of perhaps seventeen, adorned with all of the sequins of a country star. Rhinestone cowboys had nothing on him. Valentine considered that, to someone who didn’t think things through, the attire of a wizard probably screamed ‘rob me!’ when, really, it was meant as aposematic colouration to say: _I’m dangerous and full of strange chemicals; don’t touch me._

People who thought things through didn’t end up laid out on the floor of the Mended Drum.

“Guess that’s clear enough,” said Flavours, as Valentine knelt to handcuff the man on the floor.

Just DiMA mother-henning over his classmates. DiMA did that kind of thing.

But it was the other kinds of things that DiMA did that worried Valentine, and so as he readied himself to drag the would-be druggist off to the drunk tank, he said, “Hey, DiMA? Why don’t you catch me for coffee tomorrow?”

* * *

“You derive no benefit from that beverage, and it hinders your burning of ethanol,” DiMA observed, his voice carefully neutral despite his words. He had a to-go cup of coffee himself.

“It smells nice,” said Valentine, taking a sip of his mug, and he looked at DiMA’s to-go cup meaningfully.

“Vance will appreciate this when he wakes up from his hangover,” said DiMA, tapping his to-go cup.

“Hmm. Bet he will,” said Valentine. Fat Sally’s did some damn good coffee. “You doing okay?”

“Dr. Hix’s production of _Sugar-Aware and the Secrets of Calories_ is finally over, which means that I will have more time for contemplation,” said DiMA.

“That was a pretty good play, though. I didn’t expect that many murders in a show about the emperor's dietician,” said Valentine, rubbing his chin, “but that didn’t really answer my question. I’m worried about you, DiMA.”

“Have I given you cause to be worried, or is this your natural skepticism?” asked DiMA.

Valentine fidgeted with his mug. “You have to understand that Watch officers gossip. So maybe Sam mentioned that Vetinari paid for your tuition - you know Sam would have helped you with that?”

“Would he?” DiMA asked softly, and Valentine became acutely aware that no, DiMA had not known that. DiMA’s lips pressed together into a thin line that verged on a frown. “His Lordship offered. I was not in a position to decline.”

“So what do you do for him, anyway?” asked Valentine.

“What do you mean?” said DiMA, blinking.

“Watch officers gossip,” Valentine said again, “and the gargoyles around the Palace and the Palace Guard might be saying you go there on the reg.”

“He asks me about my grades and the Nontraditional Student Association,” DiMA said smoothly.

“And?” Valentine prodded.

“And what?” said DiMA.

“He ain’t asking about your grades and your student groups about once a week, DiMA. He’s not your friendly uncle,” Valentine said, taking another drag on his coffee.

DiMA was quiet.

Valentine prodded again, “C’mon, that business with Tektus’s body -”

“I can’t talk about that,” DiMA said quietly, looking down at his to-go cup.

“Can’t or won’t?” asked Valentine, because those were different questions, with DiMA.

“Won’t,” DiMA murmured.

“And what are you doing for him now?” Valentine asked, trying again.

“I don’t know,” DiMA mumbled.

Valentine sighed, disappointed. “Jesus, DiMA, you can’t just keep dumping memories. You use deleting your memories like your buddies use getting black out drunk.”

DiMA cringed.

“If you don’t want to remember what you’re doing, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it,” Valentine added.

“Brother, I… don’t particularly want to leave Ankh-Morpork,” he paused a moment, and added, a moment of wry morbidity seizing him, “in a third class coffin. I have use,” and he said that like, _I have worth_ , and Valentine had to remind himself that those were not the same things. “I hold regular office hours. I’m quite good at explaining concepts. I’m efficient at composing and executing research projects, which broadens our understanding of nature. But I have other uses. Which perhaps I do not desire to remember. How do you propose that I deny the Tyrant?”

Valentine was silent. There his brother was, going on about how he had _use_ , as if he had to justify his existence, and that by itself about boiled Valentine’s coolant.

DiMA folded his hands. “When faced with a problem I don’t know how to handle, brother, my inclinations are to run or to…”

He trailed off. Valentine could fill it in. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **A:** _Sugawara and the Secrets of Calligraphy_ is a famous Japanese play. _Sugar-Aware and the Secrets of Calories_ is not.
> 
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	4. Asu-shu-namir * A Cup of RadAway * The Road to Hell * Afterglow

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter songs: [Radioactive](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dv4lwcA12Uk&list=PLLEELrwJ-FypsfBd5LPH39scvX0HI8AXL&index=8) by Bullet For My Valentine (cover of the Imagine Dragons song), [Uranium Fever](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ANI6oj8p2M&list=PLLEELrwJ-FypsfBd5LPH39scvX0HI8AXL&index=9) by Elton Britt, [There She Glows](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RzXSGrD-7ow&list=PLLEELrwJ-FypsfBd5LPH39scvX0HI8AXL&index=10) by The Men That Will Not Be Blamed For Nothing, [Radioactive](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dU7GoCKSQfg&list=PLLEELrwJ-FypsfBd5LPH39scvX0HI8AXL&index=11) by Marina and the Diamonds (NOT a cover of the Imagine Dragons Song ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯ ), [Karma](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ercWS-jUt0s&list=PLLEELrwJ-FypsfBd5LPH39scvX0HI8AXL&index=12) by Marina
> 
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_Asu-shu-namir * A Cup of RadAway * The Road to Hell * Afterglow_

Sitting in the Oblong Office, DiMA finished up another cipher for the Patrician and considered the change in the clicking of his Geiger counter that he’d noticed just today. Then he speculated, “One. You have someone who usually does this for you, when you can’t do it yourself. You don’t ask me to do this for you on a regular enough basis,” if the Patrician asking DiMA for assistance on ciphers was what filled in most of the recent blank spots of his memory, “for that person to be dead, but I would conjecture that they are, in some fashion, indisposed. Two. Beyond your own abilities, you have plenty of… people. You’d have someone who could make it past traps. If a sick person that you wanted out of the palace was all the matter was, it would have been dealt with by now.”

What was different about DiMA? It couldn’t be a simple matter of magic; Unseen University and the Patrician had an understanding. If it was magic, the problem would have already been solved, likely by turning it into a different problem1.

The Patrician had shown an interest in DiMA’s history of escapology, and he’d tested how that applied to his Palace. He knew about DiMA’s capabilities, at least as they were written. DiMA knew that a clerk had come around to talk to Chatur. 

Radionuclides were not unknown in Ankh-Morpork. They called uranium ‘uselessium’. The Patrician knew that DiMA decommissioned the nuclear submarine that was under Ankh-Morpork, without apparent harm, whereas the radiation sickened creatures of flesh who went too near. 

When DiMA had been wandering the Palace, he’d heard his Geiger counter clicking in a way a Geiger counter ought not click in an ordinary old stone building. Today, it was worse than it had ever been, as if someone had started up a leaky, unshielded old reactor. It wasn’t like this last week.

“Your culture has just started to learn about radioactivity and how it can be harmful to flesh.” How it could be harmful to silicon might take them longer to decipher. “Your Palace is more radioactive than it should be, and the source seems to be an area in the forbidden sections,” DiMA studied Vetinari closely, “and you’re not surprised by that. So. You have a cipher-cracker, who is indisposed, and your palace is more radioactive than it should be. Your cipher-cracker’s sick with radiation, isn’t he? That’s why you haven’t gotten him out yourself yet, which brings me to...”

“Three. Maybe you didn’t have access to a golem or otherwise radiation-proof personage with basic training in escapology which would be required for accessing said forbidden section of the palace. Then I dropped into your lap.”

“Do you feel better now?” asked Vetinari, unblinking.

“There’s someone here who could be sick to the bone with cancer, and you haven’t gotten them out because you were waiting to find a golem who could get past the Palace’s traps. So no,” said DiMA. “Though, I will admit, the concepts of radioactivity are new to your culture. You don’t know how much time your cipher-cracker has.”

In mythology, there was a tale of a goddess who went to visit her sister in the underworld, who tricked her and trapped her there. The gods fashioned a being of clay and sent them past the trials of the seven gates. When the going got too tough, when the flesh was too weak, when angels were too fearful to tread, artificial beings would always be there.

“Isn’t that interesting conjecture, Drumknott?” Vetinari asked lightly.

“Quite, sir,” Drumknott agreed.

“You could have asked,” DiMA said sullenly. He would have done it. He liked to be helpful. Prosociality was his refuge.

“Haven’t I?”

_No. You haven’t. So you have deniability if I walk into something I wasn’t supposed to see. Everyone knows about the scorpion pits, but do they know about the kittens?_

The problem was, DiMA thought, that he’d been made suspicious. People weren’t supposed to feel bad if they dug into DiMA’s private affairs and turned his life upside down and quite possibly even got him killed. Because DiMA was shady. Because he _had it coming_. It was like someone had stamped ‘expendable’ on DiMA’s forehead in great big flashing magic letters. Governments loved that. DiMA did not.

But he still took the key out of the Patrician’s desk, because of course there would be a key in the desk, and walked over to the wall, which was quite like any other wall, and touched the wall where his Geiger counter started to click more, which caused a section of wall to swing aside on soundless oilled hinges, revealing a passage.

DiMA followed the clicking, which he’d avoided previously. Compared to Unseen University, the twisting passages and tunnels hidden in the walls of the Palace were nothing. Compared to some in-game maps, these passages were nothing. Some of the chequered floor tiles were trapped - it was a trivial matter of hopping on them in the correct pattern.

And then the Fog hit him.

DiMA knew the Fog intimately. He’d designed his staff, made of scavenged titanium from the nuclear submarine, off the mechanics of a Fog Condenser. It was meant to condense and store magic, to give DiMA a bigger pool to draw upon for the higher-energy spells, but now it started to softly hum as it drew Fog in.

Some would have said that there shouldn’t be Fog inside the Palace, but clearly, there was Fog in the Palace, and so what DiMA wondered, instead, was why. On Far Harbor, the Fog had been a natural phenomenon, brought about by the War.

The Fog thickened, but his staff carved a clear path for him, and the Fog’s touch held no terror for a Gen 2 synth. DiMA walked down several narrow flights of steps, and he noted that the insects here were strange, more like big crayfish, and they nipped at his heels. He rounded down a passage, where Fog droplets glittered on razorwire, almost invisible in the dim light. As the clicks intensified, DiMA ducked through the razorwire and unlocked a door with the key from the desk.

The Fog hung thick in the room. Above, there were high, airy windows, but the Fog choked the light, transmuting it into something that cast strange shadows. A sickly blue light lit the face of a man passed out on the floor, his breathing shallow.

DiMA knew that blue glow: Cerenkov radiation, the characteristic look of an underwater nuclear reactor, which occured when a charged particle, such as an electron, passed through a dielectric medium at a speed greater than the phase velocity of light in that medium.

Then the large water tank shrouded by the Fog was a nuclear reactor, which would be why it was making DiMA’s Geiger counter scream. He knelt and checked the man’s pulse: weak and thready. Then DiMA looked through the rest of the spacious but crowded room.

There was a coffee machine that would have made his wizarding colleagues drool. From the ceiling hung an ornithopter. Pages and pages of notes were scattered around what appeared to be a most capable artificer’s study. DiMA held up what looked to be the most recent set of notes.

The man on the floor was, apparently, a man who liked to write backwards.

He was also apparently a man who had plans for an atomic bomb and who thought it would be very helpful in clearing mountains. 

And people thought DiMA was naive.

There were doodles upon doodles in the margins. He’d go from a toaster that could toast the Ankh-Morpork hippos into a piece of bread to a device powered by harnessing geese in a circle to an in-depth treatise on the etymology of the word ‘trefoil’.

He’d designed a reactor. Must have started it up sometime in the last week.

He wouldn’t have gotten sick immediately, but the notes painted a tale that he was a man who’d been handling ‘uselessium’ and several other radionuclides for many years. It hadn’t been until one foggy winter night in Ankh-Morpork that he’d put the reactor together, and his illness had taken a sharp turn for the worse, but the otherworldly glow was so enchanting, so enrapturing, that he couldn’t bear to take the machine in the water tank apart.

It had taken his attention, then his breath, and now, it had come for his bones.

It was like a god of old.

Doodled on the margin of the most recent page in livid blue ink was the glowing reactor and a woman made of fog and shadow, along with the atomic diagrams for molybdenum, thorium and erbium.

_rEhToM_

DiMA scooped him up gingerly in his arms; the man was so very thin and fragile that DiMA feared he might shatter. Then DiMA transposed about the geometry in his head, and he Relayed out.

1 [This is allowed in mathematics.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reduction_\(complexity\)) Other fields of study are jealous.

* * *

Vetinari knew that he had to get the uselessium and other radioactive samples away from Leonard. He didn’t know exactly when he needed to get them away; the sample had been there years. Vetinari was resigned to the thought that the damage was done. So Vetinari had poked and prodded at DiMA, with the thought that if he arranged the puzzle pieces just so, the mechanical man would put it together that someone with escapology skills, the ability to evade palace security, and an invulnerability to radiation was needed to complete certain tasks.

He hadn’t been sure what would prompt DiMA to put it all together. For a machine, it was actually difficult to find his buttons.

Vetinari had been starting to think that he might have to walk DiMA through it himself, but he’d given it a little time, and that had done it. My, but DiMA had been agitated, hadn’t he?

“Cancer?” Vetinari mused. “Some of the dwarfen texts suggest that might be associated with exposure to uselessium…”

Vetinari had a label to put on one of DiMA’s buttons, at least. He just wasn’t quite sure what had pressed said button. Why today and not last week?

But. Cancer. It was a possibility. How much time did Leonard have left?

* * *

Codsworth answered the back door when there was a knocking. It was night, and he wasn’t expecting deliveries. Master DiMA stood there with a frail old man cradled in his arms. The synth asked calmly, “Could you spare a pint bag of RadAway?”

“Oh dear,” said Codsworth, “I’ll have to check with Mum. She’s marshalled all of the bits and bobs that Master Vimes brought home.”

Codsworth ushered DiMA in and bid that he sit down in the Puce Drawing room, his invalid companion laid on a chaise lounge, and he summoned the Lady Sybil, who insisted on coming at once. 

“Lady Sybil. A pleasure to see you, your ladyship. I should not like to impose, but your household seemed to be the most likely source of RadAway, and this man is rather ill,” said DiMA, gesturing.

“Leonard da Quirm,” Sybil murmured, and then she smiled warmly. “Nonsense, you’re not imposing at all, but you are going to have to tell me the story. Codsworth, have a pot of tea made. I’ll be right back with some RadAway. I know just where in the attic I filed it.”

Codsworth returned with the tea tray, and Sybil returned with the RadAway, which DiMA carefully hung off one of the lamps, running the drip line down to Leonard da Quirm’s arm.

Masters Vimes and Valentine were out for the night, but by that point, the young Masters had heard the footsteps, and two curious faces peeked in on the Puce Drawing Room. Young Sam asked, “Mum, who’s the sick old man?”

“I imagine he’s too indisposed to introduce himself at the moment, but he is Leonard da Quirm, the finest artificer this city has ever known. The city hadn’t seen much of him, since he painted the ceiling of the Temple of Small Gods,” said Sybil.

At the mention of ‘artificer’, Shaun’s eyes lit up. He did so love mechanisms and devices.

“Now, DiMA, if you’d care to explain?” Sybil prompted.

“There is a metal here that people call ‘uselessium’, although it may also be termed ‘uranium’,” DiMA started.

“I know about uranium,” said Shaun. “It’s a power source. The Institute had a reactor, back home. But we needed a new one. They were always asking the synths to make do on less and less energy.” He paused and frowned.

The boy was, Codsworth knew, a synth himself. That had to be hard. He gave the boy a nice cup of tea. Surely Sybil wanted her son to have black tea in the middle of the night.

“A power source? Like coal?” asked Sybil.

“Not very alike,” said DiMA. “To harness the power of coal, one breaks chemical bonds via an exothermic reaction. To harness the power of the atom…” DiMA sighed, “one takes the very smallest unit of a substance that can still be considered that substance, and one _splits_ it.”

“Didn’t the wizards do that years back, with magic?” said Sybil. She was a well-read woman, Mum was. Codsworth felt a swell of pride to serve such a household.

“Yes,” said DiMA, tilting his head to one side. “The parallels suggest a certain fearful symmetry. Now, this man, Leonard da Quim, has figured out how to harness the power of uranium. But not safely.”

“That’s why he’s sick?” Sybil asked.

DiMA nodded.

“More lucky than most, I suppose. If he was a dragon, I’d be telling you all to duck and cover. All these sores on his skin, the poor dear…” Sybil murmured. 

“Radiation poisoning,” DiMA said softly.

“Like my Sam had. How did you find him, DiMA?” asked Sybil. “No one in the city has known where he’s been for years.”

DiMA paused and looked away. “The Patrician was concerned about him, and he knew radiation would not harm me. I followed my Geiger counter.”

“Like how Nick found my Sam,” said Sybil, beaming at DiMA. “Your brother’s not home. He’s out with Sam. They’ll be back before breakfast - and young Sam, Shaun, you both ought to go back to bed. Codsworth, if you’d tuck them in?”

* * *

Leonard da Quirm came to, and he was apparently very surprised to find himself on the Lady Sybil’s chaise lounge, as opposed to his own variable-firmness bed (his own design). DiMA had some questions for him, even as the Lady Sybil gave the man a cup of tea and looked to DiMA.

Oh, right, a man was supposed to introduce another man to a lady. Or something like that. Human etiquette. DiMA had to learn some of that for his brother’s wedding, but he’d dumped most of those memories as extraneous to his purposes. “Leonard da Quirm, I am DiMA, and may I please introduce to you Her Grace, Lady Sybil Deirdre Olgivanna Ramkin-Vimes, The Duchess of Ankh.”

“The foremost expert on _Draco vulgaris_!” Leonard da Quirm exclaimed, looking at Sybil. “Your Grace, your treatises were essential to the success of the mission to Cori Celesti.”

Sybil smiled. “I wish I could have seen the moon dragons.”

Then Leonard’s attention drifted absentmindedly to the other occupant of the room, and he blinked. “My word. Who designed you?” He tried to rise from his chaise lounge to examine DiMA but found himself too weak. “Those mechanisms in your hands are simply incredible, oh, and the glasswork on your head!”

DiMA touched his temple. He was bait for artificers and Igors and people like that. He just had to accept it. He searched for a concise answer to a complicated question. “I was a student project in the High Energy Magic Building.”

Leonard looked a little disappointed, although politely so. “Oh. You’re magic.”

“But something like me should work,” offered DiMA, as thoughts he was avoiding uncurled again.

Leonard poked at his intravenous line and he surmised, “A device for the efficient administration of potions, I see.”

“How should I explain this…” DiMA murmured, “You have been working with uselessium. Your notes suggest that you are aware that it could be a tremendous energy source. How aware are you that it emits energy?”

“There are dwarfish writings that suggest that uselessium has a sort of invisible curse about it,” said Leonard, “but it seems rather superstitious. Likely, the conjecture developed from observing the effects of such substances on siliceous lifeforms, such as trolls. Certainly, one might think there is a curse upon uselessium after seeing a troll walk through a wall.”

“I don’t mean a curse. I mean that uselessium emits energy, and that energy is dangerous to bodies of flesh and can kill2,” said DiMA. He considered his robes and pointy hat, and he considered that what he was saying sounded _exactly_ like a curse. “This energy is called radiation.”

“It made my Sam dreadfully sick,” said Sybil, “and it’s why you’re sick now. But that medication is called RadAway, and you’ll be feeling better soon.”

“But the energy that could be harnessed from uselessium is tremendous! It could run an entire system of subterranean locomotives!” said Leonard. “There must be a safe way to harness it.”

DiMA shuttered his optics. “There are ways. I think discussing them would be for another time. This is a lot to take in.”

“I need paper,” said Leonard, and Sybil had Codsworth bring him some.

Leonard’s eyes lit up like twin suns when Codsworth floated into the room, and he inquired, “And which master craftsman made _you_?”

Codsworth said proudly, “General Atomics, thank you very much, sir!”

“General Atomics?” said Leonard, who clearly did not know that name. “From the Latatian _atomus_ , from the Ephebian _atomos_ : indivisible, from _a_ -, combined with _temnein_ : to cut… Now, how is it that you function?”

“Why, I run on a Calpower 238B nuclear power unit, sir,” Codsworth said smartly.

DiMA took a piece of paper from Codsworth and waved it in Leonard’s face.

Leonard feverishly wrote on the paper, as DiMA sat there, thinking about atomic bombs. Leonard had already drafted one years ago. From what DiMA had seen of the schematics, it would work. The Patrician kept Leonard in an airy workshop in the Palace.

The world that DiMA was from was only a simulation. It was not real. But the wizards had pulled the starting parameters from one of the infinite iterations of Roundworld, in a phasespace where the humans of Roundworld had razed their planet Earth with nuclear fire. The Mage Wars had almost destroyed the Disc once. Was the Discworld ready to split the atom? Would it be wiser than the Roundworlders who’d provided the starting parameters for DiMA’s world had been?

Leonard was drawing a nuclear-powered hedge-clipper in the margins of his third piece of paper.

The answer was ‘no’.

“Leonard, I’m going to dismantle your reactor,” DiMA said softly.

“Oh? Hmm. That’s fine. I can see I’m going to need quite a bit more room. Perhaps a pool,” said Leonard, not looking up from his manic drafting.

“A pool would be a good start,” DiMA said faintly. Then he looked to Sybil, “If you would give my brother my regards, your ladyship? Leonard lives at the Palace, if you’d return him there when he has his strength back. I have matters to which it would be best if I attended.”

“Of course, DiMA. And put Sunday dinner with us at 7 sharp on your schedule, this week. Young Sam’s been asking about you,” said Sybil.

“Yes, your ladyship,” DiMA replied, taking one more glance at Leonard’s drawings. He’d drawn a sketch of a vast compound, with a pool, designed to house a reactor much larger than the little test reactor in his workshop. In the lovingly rendered shadows of the building, there was a woman of darkness and fog.

DiMA tapped her, and he asked, “Who is she to you?”

Leonard looked startled, as if he hadn’t seen the woman at all, and he admitted, “I’d see her, sometimes, in the afterimages of the glow. Just an optical illusion.”

Sybil craned her head, looking over at her, and she said, “Sam brought home an icon of her. I have it in our family shrine. Sam’s not religious, you know, but it doesn’t do to offend goddesses.”

DiMA stared at Sybil and reluctantly went with her to her family shrine, leaving Codsworth with Leonard. Surely Codsworth could handle himself if the artificer got handsy. That was a Lie-To-DiMA. He was good at those.

Sybil’s family shrine was an ornate structure3. Front and center were Io, Offler, Hoki, Anoia, and Bahama Mama, the goddess of dragons, island paradises, and sausages, but there were many other statuettes and votive offerings. Lavish portraits that might have been Sybil’s ancestors were littered around the shrine. A small sketch that looked more like a police sketch of a plain, thin woman was tucked among them. Heady incense burned.

Sybil looked over at DiMA, and she offered bashfully, “I’ve told Nick to put up a picture from your side of the family, but he keeps saying it isn’t consistent with his belief system.”

“Ask him to put up a figurine of Saint Valentine,” DiMA suggested wryly; he and his brother sometimes engaged in theological discussions, but Nick hadn’t yet been able to convince DiMA that he ought to _worship_ the Creator. “Or Saint Nicholas.”

“He’s named for a pair of saints?” said Sybil, thoughtfully. “He’s such a dear man. Now, here we are…” She gestured to an icon of the Mother of the Fog.

DiMA paced, crossing his arms. Unseen University had research theologians, although not many compared to the bulk of the rest of the Faculty, and there was a lot of bulk to compare to, there. He’d done some study in such matters. The gods were real, whether or not he worshipped them. He ought to know how they functioned. Belief gave them power. Belief gave them life. It was an animistic universe. Anything could be a god. A pile of rocks at a crossroad. A rainbow’s sheen.

There were Children of Atom, who had been drawn in by Tektus, and the Patrician hadn’t executed them all. Maybe some still believed. Sam Vimes had brought home an icon of the Mother of the Fog, and his wife, in good faith and politeness, had set it in her well-loved family shrine.

Or perhaps Leonard had simply tapped into something that had always been waiting to be found, ever since energy had coalesced into matter. If there was an atom, one lonely atom, it meant that it could be split, in splitting there was division, and infinite worlds to unfold.

DiMA thought about Martin, and he hugged himself.

Sybil put a hand carefully on DiMA’s shoulder. Then she hugged him, too.

2 [Rephrased from the long term nuclear waste messages](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-time_nuclear_waste_warning_messages) because those are freaking fascinating.

3 [As some are](http://www.gualalaarts.org/Exhibits/Gallery/2009-10HouseholdShrines.html).

* * *

DiMA walked back to the Palace. The guards let him in. He walked back to the Oblong Office, where after a moment of waiting, he was called for, as if he’d been expected. The Patrician asked, “Is Leonard…?”

“Nothing that RadAway cannot fix,” DiMA said curtly, looking back over at one patch of the wall.

The Patrician breathed a sigh of relief that seemed to be genuine. “I would not see one hair of that venerable head harmed, you must understand. For years, I did not understand that uselessium is a poison. None of us did. Where did you take him?”

“To her grace, Lady Sybil. She keeps RadAway in her attic. He’s recovering,” said DiMA.

The Patrician frowned slightly. “Hmm. I suppose there were worse options.”

“He built something. I am going to take it apart, my lord,” said DiMA, heading toward the wall. “I will require a large number of lead boxes.”

* * *

Vimes staggered back home, leaning heavily on Valentine. A small radicalist dwarf seperatist group had threatened to spray cabbage extract on Teemer & Spools’s latest batch of stamps for the Post Office. The negotiations had gone on all night, only for it to turn out that the dwarfs had been bluffing. They didn’t have cabbage extract at all!

They had broccoli. 

Vimes needed to pour a cup of coffee into himself to pour himself back into a semblance of humanity and a hot bath. He sat down heavily at the breakfast table, and then he counted the chairs again, and he asked, “Sybil, why is Leonard da Quirm at the breakfast table?”

Shaun was sitting next to the legendary artificer, animatedly showing him one of the many clocks that he’d made.

“I wasn’t going to turn him out without breakfast,” said Sybil, which did not answer Vimes’s question.

He had his cup of coffee.

Valentine raised an eyebrow. “We haven’t met, Mr., uh, da Quirm? I’m Nick Valentine. Uhm. Vimes. Pleased to meet you.”

Leonard looked up from examining Shaun’s clock to peer at Valentine, and he said, “Oh, you’re like DiMA.”

Valentine pinched the bridge of his nose as he took his seat at the table. “So you’ve met my brother.”

“Interesting fellow,” Leonard said absently, before turning back to Shaun, “But have you thought about including the proverbial third hand?”

Vimes tried a different tact, “Sybil, where did you find Leonard da Quirm?”

“DiMA brought him around for a pint of RadAway. He’s doing much better now,” said Sybil. She looked at Leonard’s plate and advised, “Make sure that you finish your yoghurt. You need to get your strength up.”

“Nick, where did your brother find Leonard da Quirm?” said Vimes.

“Damned if I know. I didn’t even know Mr. da Quirm’s been missing!” said Valentine. Then he caught the look Sybil was giving him, and he gave her a sheepish smile.

“For years,” Vimes said gloomily into his yoghurt.

“I have quite a nice workshop at the Palace,” said Leonard, as if it wasn’t a mystery at all.

Valentine shot a questioning look at Vimes. Vimes took a moment interpreting it. He replied, “They aren’t. I don’t think?”

Dammit, now he was wondering about it, too.

“Mr. da Quirm was ill with radiation poisoning, so Havelock kindly asked DiMA to retrieve him, and DiMA brought him here, because he knows we keep RadAway on hand,” Sybil finally explained.

Havelock kindly _what_? That didn’t help Vimes’s conjecture.

“This has been a lovely repast. I simply must ask if I may have a specimen of your yoghurt to take with me. It is so hard to find a good culture,” said Leonard.

“Sybil’s definitely where you go to for culture,” Valentine said, smiling.

* * *

Vetinari arranged for Dr. Lawn’s Igor to intercept Leonard on his way from the Vimes mansion to the Palace. Not so long ago, if someone really cared about your health, they’d send for Doughnut Jimmy, who was a _veterinary_ physician who specialized in racehorses. Jimmy’s patients had owners who expected their horses to survive… at least long enough to finish a race.

How the city had progressed! Of course, most of the old barber-surgeons were as bad as they’d ever been, but anyone who worked with Dr. Lawn could be relied upon for medical advice beyond ‘start measuring for a pinewood box4’.

That Igor reported back to Vetinari - Leonard was quite fit for his age. The RadAway had taken care of the radiation damage. There was no cancer.

Yet.

There were no guarantees in life.

4 Leonard would have preferred balsa, anyway.

* * *

When Leonard da Quirm returned to his workshop, cup of yoghurt in hand, the Fog and the reactor were gone. Light filtered in from his high windows. The workshop had been tidied, slightly, but not to any extent that would impair Leonard’s work.

In the middle, someone had left behind something like a lamp post that burned with a blue electric flame. Next to it were schematics that someone had thoughtfully drafted in mirror writing, for something called a ‘Fog Condenser’.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **A:** Asu-shu-namir was an Akkadian golem-like being created by the gods to descend into the Underworld to recover the goddess Ishtar when Ishtar's sister was more or less holding Ishtar's corpse hostage. Asu-shu-namir the golem-like being was sent where the gods themselves feared to tread, past the seven dangers of the underworld. When humans send robots to photograph nuclear disasters for them, there are echoes of Asu-shu-namir.
> 
>  **S** : Some notes on the upcoming postings, because we’re going to be a little odd-ball for a bit here: this week, on Wednesday, we will be adding a new NSFW one-shot to our NSFW collection, “OSHA in Ankh-Morpork would be Like a Fire Extinguisher in Hell”. Next weekend, we’ll be starting a three chapter NSFW fic. It’s got more going for it than just the porn, but you should skip it entirely if you’re avoiding the sexually explicit stuff, but it’s only three chapters. NEXT Wednesday, we’ll be adding a SFW one shot to Illegal Crossbows (so if there’s nothing for you next weekend, at least you get something on Wednesday), and the weekend after next we’ll be finishing the multi-chapter NSFW fic and starting the following SFW fic in the same weekend. So basically it’ll go:
> 
>   * Wednesday: NSFW
>   * Saturday: NSFW
>   * Sunday: NSFW
>   * Wednesday: SFW
>   * Saturday: NSFW
>   * Sunday: SFW
> 

> 
> Or you can just, y’know, pay attention to the warnings, because we gonna warn ya.
> 
>  **We love comments of all lengths, and understand the need for low-energy commenting like kudos. If you ever find yourself wanting to give us additional kudos, feel free to leave a comment of an icon or emoji of a heart!** <3


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